Brain aging patterns in a large and diverse cohort of 49,482 individuals

[circular]

I searched the forum for this recent paper and don't see that it's come up. It's pretty complicated. One thing that surprises me is that drinking coffee is positively associated with a pattern of brain aging associated with Alzheimer's. I don't know whether or not there's confounding by other dietary factors that are often coincident with drinking coffee, or whether their fancy statistics have ruled that out. I had thought that coffee was helpful for us. Any thoughts on that or any other curious associations here, like I need to start watching TV and eat more (whole grain) cereals? It seems like trying to apply this this data could get reductionist fast, but it's a huge study.

Brain aging patterns in a large and diverse cohort of 49,482 individuals

It's behind a paywall and not on Sci-Hub. I saw a writeup about it that included the chart in Eric Topal's substack at https://erictopol.substack.com/p/slowin ... rain-aging

It took about 8 years for Christos Davatzikos and colleagues to complete and publish a study of nearly 50,000 participants with brain MRIs. This involved training a deep learning A.I. model (called Surreal-GAN) from healthy people (N=1,150, aged 20-49 years) and nearly 9,000 older adults. Then this model was applied to a diverse, large multi-cohort population (from 11 studies) and 5 discrete (R) patterns of brain atrophy emerged as shown below, with 3 of them (R2,3 and 5) associated with increased risk of dementia once mild cognitive impairment (MCI) was manifest.

[NF52]

I searched the forum for this recent paper and don't see that it's come up. It's pretty complicated. One thing that surprises me is that drinking coffee is positively associated with a pattern of brain aging associated with Alzheimer's. I don't know whether or not there's confounding by other dietary factors that are often coincident with drinking coffee, or whether their fancy statistics have ruled that out. I had thought that coffee was helpful for us. Any thoughts on that or any other curious associations here, like I need to start watching TV and eat more (whole grain) cereals? It seems like trying to apply this this data could get reductionist fast, but it's a huge study.

Brain aging patterns in a large and diverse cohort of 49,482 individuals

It's behind a paywall and not on Sci-Hub. I saw a writeup about it that included the chart in Eric Topal's substack at https://erictopol.substack.com/p/slowin ... rain-aging

Hi Circ,

I found a free Preprint of this article on PubMed from October 2023: Five dominant dimensions of brain aging are identified via deep learning: associations with clinical, lifestyle, and genetic measures By the way, I'm not sure why Eric Topal referred to Christos Davatzikos as if he were the primary author; he's actually listed last in a very long line of authors. That usually means that person was in charge of the lab, or was consulted in the editing of the piece, but Zhijian Yang is the primary author of both the preprint and final article.

Here's the good news: You can keep drinking coffee!

Our analyses of lifestyle and environmental factors elucidated additional correlates of the observed variations, thus suggesting potential interventions targeted at specific dimensions. Smoking and alcohol consumption, two important risk factors across organ systems, are negatively associated with cortical atrophy, primarily mapping to the R4 and R5 dimensions, with lesser effects on R3. In addition, daily dietary habits correlate with R4 and R5, having either negative (tea, cereal) or positive (cheese, coffee, salt) relationships. Directly managing lifestyle or investigating underlying mechanisms might yield feasible interventions, although further studies are needed to understand causal relationships. Expression of any of the 5 intermediate phenotypes identified herein can serve as an indicator of active involvement of respective genetic and lifestyle risk factors, thereby prompting more aggressive patient management as well as recruitment to respective clinical trials.

Just to relate it more to ApoE 4, this is from a 2023 article on : The Association between Coffee and Tea Consumption at Midlife and Risk of Dementia Later in Life: The HUNT Study

Furthermore, the association between boiled coffee and increased dementia risk was only found in ApoE4 non-carriers. Differences by sex or ApoE4 carrier status were not supported by strong statistical evidence for interaction. Tea consumption was not associated with dementia risk.

For those wondering what R3, R4 and R 5 refer to, here's a chart:

Screenshot 2024-09-08 at 10.44.09 AM.png